Line of Fire by Stephen White

I've really enjoyed this series featuring Boulder, Colorado-based psychologist Alan Gregory. While he wasn't someone I'd want to be friends with in real life, I liked the relationships he had with his significant others--wife Lauren (a by-the-book lawyer with the DA's office, who is living with MS), his work partner Diane, his neighbor Adrienne (a feisty physician who was often the voice of reason), and his best friend Sam the cop. I also liked the Boulder setting. Stephen White has decided to end this long-running series and Line of Fire is the first half of the final chapter. Unfortunately, it was my least favorite book of the series. Alan and Sam are normally intelligent men. However in L of F, they do one boneheaded thing after another. The most lame-brained (and totally out of character) example is having a conversation about the death (in an earlier book) of a woman who had stalked and was planning to kill their children. The death was ruled a suicide but the case may be reopened and classified a homicide, which would be bad news for Sam, who actually killed the woman and manipulated the evidence. Instead of having this conversation where they are guaranteed privacy, they have it in the middle of a busy hospital--in the room of a patient they assume (as it turns out mistakenly) is in a coma. The other problem with this book is that the strong women characters are all MIA. Adrienne is gone, Diane is having a nervous breakdown and Lauren is barely involved in the story until the very end. So it's mostly Alan and Sam squabbling about whether or not they're going to be implicated in the woman's death--and Alan being so distracted that he's not even being a very good psychologist. While all this is going on, there is a major wildfire in the Boulder area. I can see that White was trying to ramp up the tension of the fire getting closer to Boulder, where it could literally burn Alan and Sam, while their past actions were figuratively about to burn them. But I never felt that sense of tension from the fire that would have made it an effective dramatic element. I will read the final volume just to see how the story ends (this one ends with several story lines unresolved). But I have to say, if you're new to this series, the rest of the books were much better than Line of Fire.